Dyslexic in the Woods

Fri Nov 6 · Science

Astrophysicists with dyslexia were better than their colleagues without it at spotting a simulated black hole in a noisy graph. [1] The people who struggle with print beat the people who don't at finding the thing that didn't belong.

Sit with that for a second.

What the weeds know

The scientist Christopher Tonkin describes his version of this as a sensitivity to "things out of place." He is easily bothered by the weeds among the flowers in his garden, and he built a career on that instinct. [1] That is the whole forest idea in one garden bed. Put a dyslexic brain in a wood and the story goes that it picks out the one branch that is wrong, the print that is the only odd thing in a thousand leaves.

The title of this post is a lens, not a finding. As far as we can find, nobody has tested dyslexic readers in actual forests. What exists is a smaller, stranger pile of lab results, and it is worth looking at honestly.

The impossible-figure test

In 2003 a team led by Catya von Károlyi showed people drawings of Escher-style "impossible figures," shapes that look like solid objects but could never exist, mixed with ordinary drawings. The fastest people at picking out the impossible ones were people with dyslexia. [2] The researchers had not expected it. These were people who read slowly, and they were quick at a task about whether a whole object makes sense. [1]

Matthew Schneps, who has dyslexia himself, founded the lab at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics that ran the next two studies. [1] The second hint: college students with dyslexia were better at memorizing blurry, x-ray-like images. [1] The black-hole result is the third. All three are about the same skill: seeing the whole pattern and noticing what breaks it.

The honest complication

Nobody knows why. Maybe dyslexic brains are built to see this way. Or maybe it is a trade. Learning to read rewires the visual system. When illiterate adults were taught to read, brain imaging showed changes, and they lost some old abilities, like telling when an object is the mirror image of another. [1] On that view the strengths are what's left when a brain isn't spending years on print. Schneps and colleagues also suggest that trouble managing visual attention may be part of the story. [1]

And the evidence is thin. The International Dyslexia Association's own journal says that direct empirical support for a talent-in-dyslexia hypothesis, while intriguing, remains thin, and some people worry that "gift of dyslexia" talk pulls attention away from the identification and support kids need in school. [3] Dyslexia can bring real learning challenges. [1] Strengths show up in specific tasks, not in everyone.

The mirror

Plenty of us know the scene. You walk into a room and see the ceiling tile that's crooked, the picture that's a degree off, the one word on the page that's spelled wrong while everyone else reads right past it. Or the text swims and you give up on the paragraph, then look at the whole page for a second and know exactly where the chart goes wrong. A lot of us build whole lives out of seeing the shape of a thing before its details. That is not a superpower. It is just a mind with a different default.

The cosmic part

Zoom out, Neil deGrasse Tyson style. Writing is a recent invention, and reading is a trick we train the visual system to do. Reading takes unnaturally precise, split-second control of the eyes, and doing it for years restructures the brain. [1] So a brain that doesn't fully take to the trick may be leaning on an older habit: take in all of it at once and look for what's out of place. That part is our guess, not a finding.

Rust Cohle spends a whole season noticing what everyone else walks past. The forest is full of it. Most of us were just taught to look at the page.

Sources

1. Schneps, M. H. "The Advantages of Dyslexia." Scientific American, August 19, 2014. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-advantages-of-dyslexia/
2. von Károlyi, C., Winner, E., Gray, W., & Sherman, G. F. "Dyslexia linked to talent: Global visual-spatial ability." Brain and Language, 85(3), 427–431, 2003. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0093-934x(03)00052-x
3. Cowen, C. D. "Dyslexia and Visuospatial Processing Strengths: New Research Sheds Light." The Examiner, International Dyslexia Association. https://dyslexiaida.org/dyslexia-and-visuospatial-processing-strengths-new-research-sheds-light/